


every good thing you do (feels like you mean it)

by sixtywattgloom



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-19
Packaged: 2018-02-18 01:14:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2329862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixtywattgloom/pseuds/sixtywattgloom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>They’ve been casual friends for a while, casual hook-ups more recently, but she’s never known how he likes his tea, or which person on tour he trusts most with his secrets, or what he likes to do at 3 a.m. when the crowd’s screams still have him buzzing five hours later.</i> or, the complications of no strings attached when harry styles is involved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every good thing you do (feels like you mean it)

**Author's Note:**

> this kind of came to my brain one day without my expecting it, and also i was kind of offended by the complete lack of harry/alexa on ao3. so this is the intersection of both of those things, and hopefully the one or two people who end up reading it enjoy it.

The thing about Harry Styles is that, against all odds, he turns out to be really good in bed. 

It’s everything the girls who chase after him around street corners want to hear. It’s everything the media’s been craving, with their two pages spreads about the five hundred plus girls he’s managed in a summer—which would, she thinks, be a truly incredible feat. Katy Perry in the morning, Cara Delevingne for a midafternoon snack, and maybe a romp with Ke$ha before bed.

It would’ve been far funnier if he were absolute rubbish. Fumbling around, barely managing to shove his dick inside her before he came with some awful hyena noise. Falling asleep without a word, no attempts at all to get her off. Millions of girls could’ve been jealous of her for having the worst lay of her life. _Yeah, I slept with Harry Styles, and it’s a wonder he even managed to find the right hole._

But it’s not any of those things. The only time he fumbles is when his iPod switches to _Do I Wanna Know?_ and he draws back a little, eyebrows creasing. Alexa sort of hates how much he knows—because she was too drunk to have boundaries and he has a face that gets all _sincere_ about everything and he leans up against the bar like he doesn’t care about anything else in the world except your stupid _life_. And she was really, really drunk.

Sad and drunk has always been a dangerous combination on her, so maybe she told him that even a year later sometimes she still thinks about what she had. Sometimes she still thinks about what she lost.

“Don’t you dare move,” she threatens when he fumbles, curling a hand in his hair and pulling him back down to her.

He’s on the verge of sliding inside her when he pauses again. “You sure you’re not— is it, uh—you thinking about—?” He sounds worried and a little drunk, and even though his voice drags and she can feel how hard he is between them, she knows he’d get up off the bed, walk across the room, and change the stupid playlist.

“Well now I am, you fucking twat,” she says, but she thinks her voice must go a little soft somewhere at the end because Harry smiles wide enough for her to see his dimple—or maybe he just has a kink about insults. “Would you hurry up and fuck me already,” she adds, and he presses his forehead against hers and laughs. Later, when she thinks about the first time they fucked, she’ll think about his breath hot against her mouth and a rush of improbable joy.

Also, a pretty commendable dick.

* 

The thing about Harry Styles is that he’s really a bit of a weirdo.

Which kind of works. His fervent and sincere appreciation for puns is rivaled only by her own, and she’s had to keep herself from laughing out loud at more than a couple Serious Business Meetings now that he’s taken to texting them to her throughout the day.

 _Do you know sign language?_ he sends her the first time, when she’s over at Nick’s and they’re drinking too-expensive wine and pretending to be classy. Or she’s pretending, anyway—Nick might have himself believing it a bit. 

 _What? Are you drunk already? Don’t you have a bedtime?_ she texts back, pretending that isn’t probably as much an insult to the person sleeping (occasionally!) with a teenager.

_Well, I know sign language, and it’s pretty handy._

It catches her off-guard, and she laughs enough that Nick snatches the phone from her hand, rolls his eyes, and tells her they’re both children.

She only stops laughing when she tells him he’s just offended Harry’s not texting _him_ and he threatens never to allow her near his alcohol again. She can’t exactly chance that one.

But it doesn’t stop, after that. He texts her new puns every day, and she starts sending them back. He’ll tell her about the stupid thing Liam said, or the stupid thing Louis got Liam to do, or the weirdest fact he’s learned about Virginia, and she kind of accidentally finds herself looking forward to it.

She sends him videos of drunk karaoke night, of her screaming the lyrics to _What Makes You Beautiful_ , of her favorite spots in New York and her favorite spots in London.

She starts knowing a lot about him without really meaning to. They’ve been casual friends for a while, casual hook-ups more recently, but she’s never known how he likes his tea, or which person on tour he trusts most with his secrets, or what he likes to do at 3 a.m. when the crowd’s screams still have him buzzing five hours later.

Now she knows these things. She also knows that he’s weird, like the time she walks through the front door and he’s in the middle of her kitchen cooking devilled eggs in nothing but an apron and socks, the picture of concentration.

“I understand the apron,” she says, then, “but you’ve already got everything else hanging out, so do you have a particular disdain for your feet?”

When his reply is _didn’t want to dirty your carpet_ , she’s torn between walking right back out the door and blowing him in his ridiculous socks and her ridiculous apron.

*

The thing about Harry and Alexa is that, for a no strings attached relationship, it’s gotten a bit—stringy.

He calls her up and wishes her luck every time she’s nervous—it’s kind of uncanny, like he can feel it from the opposite end of the fucking world, like he wakes up at four a.m. in Australia and thinks _Let’s see how Al’s doing, hasn’t she got that show today_ and calls her while she’s pacing around her room staring at the clothes covering the entire floor.

She calls him after his shows, some days, to hear they way he talks—she can feel his energy like electricity, and sometimes it’s just what she needs at seven-thirty a.m. when she can’t find the motivation to leave her bed for coffee. He puts up with her early morning grumbling, and lists off some of the posters he found in the crowd. Even at seven-thirty, sometimes it’s enough to make her laugh. 

“Wasn’t this supposed to be no strings?” she asks him once, when he brings her her seventh glass of water for her bone-shattering hangover the morning she’s supposed to be interviewing—someone. Someone who matters to a lot of people, she’s sure. Someone she’ll fawn over a little excessively because that’s the kind of thing they like in America. Makes her _relatable_. (Hopefully she’ll know his name, by then.)

“What are friends for?” is all Harry says. He’s the most casually nice person Alexa’s met, and it’s fucking exhausting.

It’s not like she ever wanted a not-quite-nineteen year old not-quite boyfriend who sends her bloody _handwritten cards_ on her birthday, like he couldn’t have just texted like a normal person living in the twenty-first century. And this coming from someone who doesn’t even own Microsoft Word, for fuck’s sake. All technological complaints from her really ought to be given extra weight.

When he stops being almost-nineteen, and turns _actually_ nineteen, he spends most of the night going down on her, like this is _her_ birthday. Which—not that she’s gonna start complaining about attractive blokes between her legs who actually know what to do with their tongues (it’s sort of mad, that she’s been with thirty year olds who still haven’t got this part down), but it seems a bit turned around.

“Isn’t this your birthday?” she asks, breathless and a little shaky—not surprising, given she’s just come more than once. More than twice. “Shouldn’t I be the one giving you congratulatory head?”

“Best present of the night, I’d say,” he tells her, and she sort of wants to slap him in the face because he’s so fucking _Harry_. All the time.

 She also sort of wants to propose marriage.

The thing about Harry and Alexa is that it’s not serious. They haven’t made promises of forever, or even promises of the next _night._ Harry could fuck off and run away to Spain with five different girls, and that’d be that.

But instead he comes back from tour and his first stop is at her door, yelling, “Knock knock!” 

It’s all she can do not to smile too wide. “Who’s there?”

“Theodore.”

“Theodore who?” she asks, hand at the doorknob.

“Theodore wasn’t open, so I knocked.”

When she swings open the door, he’s smiling delightedly, like he’s just told the best joke in the world, or maybe like he’s spent a lot of hours out of a lot of months missing her. And that’s that.


End file.
